ow, my brain

the weight of things

The internet weighs two ounces. So says this guy.

A statistically rough ( one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, a straight forward calculation reveals that if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz , some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.

So as of today, cyberspace weighs less than two ounces. It’s hard to gauge its heft more exactly since silicon devices vary in speed, but if you want a handle on The Whole Web instead of just the suburbs that we're wired to , try tripling that figure- there are maybe ten times more mostly idle CPU chips in PC's than in servers, and fewer very busy ones in the world's comparative handful of supercomputers .

I haven't checked this, so I can't vouch for it. Nonetheless, I like these kind of questions.

About the Author

I am an overly modest grad student in Physics with many profound and witty observations about the world around us. Right now I'm a graduate student at Brown University. My scientific interests are cosmology and astrophysics, and not merely because they sound the coolest. Among other things, I have an affinity for neutrinos, because they are the most antisocial and coolest-sounding particle, and my research involves weak gravitational lensing, which is exactly what it sounds like. Like many other grad students, I'm studying for a PhD because I have no other interests and my underdeveloped social skills preclude my spending much time in non-science situations. I have an upstanding departmental webpage here, that summarizes my nascent career and proves that I can write in LaTeX.

I am originally from Rhode Island, home of coffee milk and the nation's oldest Forth of July Parade. I first developed an interest in astronomy when quite young, and by hanging around at Brown, where, for unknown reasons, I was allowed to take a course in the subject. I was briefly home-schooled, and then attended a variety of institutions culminating with boarding school in Massachusetts. While in high school I acted in plays, studied Latin and Greek, started a Chess Club, and wrote ironic essays. At one point, I tricked the trustees into singing the national anthem of Imperial Russia. Our background was sort of lower-middle-class so I have had the unique experience of being the perennial financial aid kid from middle school up through swanky ivy-league college. That college was Dartmouth, where the lower-middle-class are hunted for sport.

I have this web-log because although I frequently joke about having a one track mind for science, I actually have eclectic interests and enjoy writing. I found I was sort of missing that type of thing. Luckily for you, I will spare the minutiae of daily life; not only would that be very boring, it would also be extremely stupid. I'll probably make an effort to cover important stories in physics, or mention various offenses against science and reason, but only when it's funny. But neither will I merely link to other blogs that link to other blogs that link to videos of cats playing musical instruments. I have made a deliberate effort to avoid profoundity.

The intended format of this blog is somewhere in between obscure science/history digressions and actual writing, usually in the form of wildly irresponsible theories. I also seem to be observing the intersection between science and culture a bit recently. The "highlights" section on the right feature some posts I would consider representative of what I am going for. The past few months have been decent too, so the archives for those should give you a good idea.

The name "Topography of Ignorance" is explained here (long obscure quote), and the "Two-Sheds" domain name here (Monty Python). Until recently the site had been called "Fish Heal Thyself" which not only didn't mean anything, but didn't even come close to meaning anything.

[Last updated 10/28/10]

A Gift of Joy

Here are some funny videos, as my Christmas gift to you people who ever read this or stumble across it. There is absolutely no connecting theme to these, they don't even have anything to do with X-Mas.


This penguin will probably be your boss in 5 years.


OK Go. I saw them in concert opening for TMBG before they were famous. My friend said she could tell they were going to be moderately sucessful. If they had done this tredmill thing at the time, there would have been no doubt,


Not really in the same catagory as these other clips, but still a nice sentiment. The whole interview is here.


Hilariously bad robber.


What part of "lockbox" don't you understand?


Improv Everywhere, the group that once set up a time loop in a starbucks sending about 80 "fake" employees into a Best Buy store.


An honest couple.


Space invaders with humans. Truly an impressive accomplishment.

You have probably seen this already. I don't care, it is holiday-themed.

Thanksgiving quote of the day:

"Some people just don't know how boring they are!!"

-My Mother's Cousin, in a brief digression on the annoyance caused by co-workers with tiresome pictures of and chatter about grandchildren. She then promptly returned to conversation about the quality of meatballs at different shops around Providence, the price of gutter repair, and the bargin of vacationing in Nova Scotia.

Fun with end times

Most internet people probably already knew about this, but I didn't so I am making a note of it. The Rapture Index, a "prophetic speedometer of end time activity" is keeping an eye on the coming of the apocalypse. They assign numerical values to categories like "satanism," "volcanoes," "interest rates," "moral standards," and worst of all "civil rights" and then sum them for an overall number that reveals how quickly we are rushing toward Armageddon. The number is then assessed in this way:

Rapture index of 85 and below: slow prophetic activity
Rapture index of 85 to 110: moderate prophetic activity
Rapture index of 110 to 145: heavy prophetic activity
Rapture index above 145: fasten your seat belts

Right now, we're at a 159 with some recent updates on "Nuclear Nations: North Korea is causing other nations to contemplate going nuclear" and "Liberalism: Democrats take control of the U.S. Congress." (didn't non-liberals allow NK to get the bomb in the first place?) and for some comparison, the all-time high was 182 on Sept 24 2001, and the low was 57 in Dec 1993. So we're almost at the level we were at right after 9/11. Yeah, that makes sense.

In any case, I am expecting a Firefox extension that puts the index in a little box on the bottom of my browser window. I can't wait 'til everybody gets raptured up and I can take their stuff.

Carrying Case

So I'm switching to ordinary lower/upper case writing from now on. I started doing exclusively lower-case because I knew I would make mistakes with capitalization and I didn't want to be offensive somehow. Plus it sort of made my writing look uniform and unpretentious, but it is just too much of a hassle to quote anything or make it clear when terms are ambiguous proper nouns, or being abbreviated without periods. There is also the thought that someone stumbling across this might just think I'm immature, and I want them to have to read through some of my posts before they figure that out.

Bubbles

Through a series of interviews this past spring I determined conclusively that girls love bubbles. Of the 42 female college students I surveyed so far not one has expressed a dissenting view. Even though I already proved it, for your own sake I dare you to find one that doesn't. You won't, because the affection between girls and bubbles is a scientific fact. Hence bubble baths, bubble tea, and bubble dances where ladies get all crazy and dance around in foam. You see, this is behavior they would never engage in ordinarily, but the bubbles compel them. The bubbles.

This brings me to the separate observation that almost all of the women I know in the physics/astronomy field fall on the astronomy side of the divide (it goes without saying that there are many important female physicists, I am just speaking in terms of personal, completely anecdotal, numbers). And representation of women in astrophysics is, I have read, closer to parity than in physics overall. This is interesting to me because as anyone in those fields could tell you, there is not a significant difference in the sort of preparation involved in astronomy, or the work itself. Despite public (mis)perception, astronomy is just as math-intensive and experimentally rigorous as straight-up physics. Besides observation vs experiment, really the only difference is that the optical astronomers happen to produce pretty pictures. And I would never insult the intelligence of women by presuming that they require the lure of visual beauty, rather than intellectual challenge, to arouse an interest in science. Nor would I suspect that women going into physics/astronomy undecided would be under the same misapprehension about the nature of the field (that it is "softer" somehow) as the general population, nor that it would make any difference to them if they were! No, the real reason that female physicists choose astronomy is that they love bubbles.

Now lets take a brief pause to think about what a genius I am for figuring this out.



For you see, nearly everything in astrophysics is somehow an extension of the principal of hydrostatic equilibrium -- the balance between gravitational collapse and the outward pressure. And as I'm sure you've guessed, the bubble is purest example of this found in nature (not the gravity part, the balancing inner and outer pressure). For stars, accretion disks, structure formation, nebulae, et cetera the H.E. condition basically determines everything you would want to know. Not only are these phenomena similar to bubbles in this sense, but perhaps more importantly there are actual bubbles in astronomy. Sure, there may be a few bubble topics in other sciences: chemistry, fluid dynamics, lava flows in geology, but astronomy subjects far outnumber them. Coronal ejection bubbles, bubbles in proto-stellar nebulae, magnetic space bubbles, structure formation bubbles, iron bubbles in supernova remnants. in inflationary models there are phase-transition bubbles and bubble nucleation.'Hubble' sounds like 'bubble'. And there are whole books about astronomical bubbles in general. In fact, the largest structures in the universe (see above diagram) seem to be galaxies arranged on the surface of unfathomably large bubbles like some sort of cosmic foam. which, I suppose, is the only similarity between the big bang and one of those soap machines at a frat party.

The career choice is not a matter of difference in cultural expectations or inherent abilities, it is a matter of inherent attraction to bubbles. How can women, with this predisposition written into their very X chromosomes read an article such as "Earth surrounded by giant fizzy bubbles" and not want to go into astronomy?

Women love bubbles. There are bubbles in astronomy. Therefore, women love astronomy. Quad erat demonstratum.

degree withheld

last week i witnessed probably one of the top 5 ironic events of my life. at the end of some pointless training chemical safety training course (in theoretical physics, spilling hot tea on yourself is about as dangerous as it gets), a gaggle of geography students wandered into the lecture hall looking for a room that was in annother building halfway accross campus. that's correct, a group of lost geographers. it seems like the one and only binding requirement of you in that field is knowing where things are.

1st annual Kneecap Day

This wednesday marks the first annual Kneecap Day! One-year anniversary of me dislocating my patella, and thenceforth irrevocably altering the course of my life (I would suppose). I like the idea of making up personal holidays, so I suppose I am going to try commemmorating it somehow. Amusingly enough, blowing up my knee seems like something I'm well-known for somehow. A few months ago I ran across this blog post on the unofficial dartmouth physics-astro blog. Not to mention the worldwide circulation of this photo, adroitly snapped by Jenn as I returned home from the ER hopped up on goofballs, and, for some reason I don't understand, sent to absolutely everyone by my father. My working theory is that he was proud that I was enough of a jock (at least temporarily) to injure myself badly enough to need crutches. The best part was visiting my grandmother at x-mas and seeing it on her fridge!



(I love how my clutzy countenance is bigger than the Virgin Mary. Take that lady!)

In any case, I am especially wondering this: what is the correct observance of a orthopedic injury? I was thinking--hit of morphine and then crumpling over for no good reason--just like last year.

iae-aaaayyy!!

i have just learned that this is the symbol of the international atomic energy commission. it is the coolest flag i have ever seen, and, i suspect, the one that physicists will use when they take over the world.

vacuuming nightmare

in quantum field theory, in the process of making calculations, there often arise situations where you can only deal with the energy difference between two states, and you ignore what an "abosolute" energy would be. in the context of understanding the Lagrangian you are working on, this doesn't cause any difficulties, but overall that supposedly meaningless absolute energy eventually becomes offset, so to speak, by the accumulation of these energy differences. it turns out that you can actually find out what all these offsets are and add them up to see the individual energy terms of every particle interaction. most of these are are "vacuum energy" terms which come into consideration only in certain situations, such as the cosmological constant problem as a potential source of missing energy (though it's too small).

well, a physicist with a sense of humor went through the trouble of finding this abomination, and making it into a pdf. in fact, he even proposes an exam question based on it!

exercise 1.1.1.1.1a: given locality, causality, lorentz invariance, and known physical data since 1860, show that the lagrangian describing all observed physical processes (sans gravity) can be written:

brilliant! i think i've woken up in a cold sweat with visions of this page in front of me. i especially like the "known physical data since 1860" part. not to mention the part about excluding gravity--since that would just be too much to ask!

link to nightmarish equation

he that flings dirt at another dirtieth himself the most

looking through the many dusty and forgotten volumes scattered throughout my home i happened across this neglected text: applied soil physics, picked up as a joke from a table of free books once. it brought two questions to light -- questions that had been gnawing at me for years.

1. not that i condone it, but is there anyone lower on the physics totem pole than soil physicists? is there someone looking up at them with scorn, saying "curse those haughty bastards!"

2. do they really need the 'applied' in the title? are there numerous books on theoretical soil physics, and if so, can i read one?